Netscape Compared To Digg, A Marketer’s Perspective

Netscape. You often hear it mentioned
alongside Digg as a
social media site, but how many of us actually use the service? Some say it
is worthless, while others say it is very useful. From being on Netscape a dozen
or so times, here’s what I’ve learned.

Timing

Just like Digg, you have 24 hours to make the homepage. The difference is
that after 24 hours, a story is removed from the listing pages on Netscape. This
means that when a story is submitted to Netscape, it will only get traffic from
Netscape for a period of 24 hours on any of the major listing pages.

Homepage

The homepage of Netscape works a bit differently than most social sites. LikeReddit, you have to work your way to the top of
the homepage, which means your story may not hit the very top. The way that
Netscape is different is that they control how many stories from each category
make the homepage. That’s why you will never see 15 political stories hit the
homepage at the same time.

If your story gets to the homepage towards the end of its lifetime, it
probably will not hit the top, and you won’t get much traffic at all — in most
cases, well under 1,000 visitors. On the other hand, if you have a very popular
story that gets to the top of the homepage in an hour, it most likely will stay
there for another 23 hours. That can mean thousands of visitors.

Audience

The majority of users on Netscape are more sophisticated than Digg users. Not
necessarily when it comes to technology, but they are interested in politics and
news. For this reason, political and educational stories tend to do better.
Netscape users still enjoy technology, humor, science, entertainment and other
topics, but those categories don’t send as much traffic.

Links

The reason why the majority of us try to leverage social sites is because of
the links. We hope that they will drive thousands of visitors to our site and
hopefully a few of those visitors will actually link to our site. By getting on
the homepage of Netscape, you get a nice temporaryPageRank 9 link.
However, the majority of Netscape visitors themselves will not link unless it is
something that they are interested in, such as politics.

Conclusion

If you think if you can get content to the homepage of Netscape that the
audience will enjoy, then you should try and leverage it, because chances are
that you will get a few links out of it. If you are submitting stories that
don’t have a chance to get high up on the homepage, then don’t waste your time.